It was dark inside the horror house. The passage folded back and forth in the fashion such things did; Stile had navigated many similar ones in the Game. Darkness did not bother him, per se. Neysa, too, could handle it, especially since her hearing was more acute than his. The light led them on through the labyrinth. A spook popped up, eyes glowing evilly: a harmless show. But it made Stile think of another kind of danger: the noose, choking him, preventing him from singing a defensive spell. That was how his other self had died. That was typical of the way the Red Adept attacked. One of these spooks could be a noose, that he would not see in the dark until it dropped over his head. He needed a specific defense against it. “Turn me loose against a noose,” he sang quietly.
A collar formed about his neck, a strong ring with sharp vertical ridges that would cut into any rope that tightened about it. Proof against a noose.
The maze-passage opened onto a narrow staircase leading up. Dim illumination came from each step, like phosphorescence, outlining its edge. A thoughtful aid from Pro-ton practice, so children would not trip and fall. Stile stepped out on the first step—and as his weight came on it, it slid down to floor level, like a downward-moving escalator. He tried again, and again the stair countered him. There did not have to be anything magical about this; it could be mounted on rollers. It could not be climbed. Yet the glow of light he had conjured to show the way was moving blithely up the stairway; that was where the Red Adept was.
“I think I’ll have to use magic again,” Stile said. He oriented on the stair and sang: “All this stair, motion for-swear.” Then he put his foot on the lowest step again. The step did not slide down. It buckled a bit, as if trying to move, but was fixed in place. Stile walked on up, each step writhing under his tread with increasing vigor, but none of the steps could slide down.
Then one step bit his foot. Stile looked down and discovered that the step had opened a toothy mouth and was masticating his boot. It was in fact a demon, compressed into step-form, and now it was resuming its natural shape. Stile had not had this sort of motion in mind when fashioning his spell, so it had not been covered. Neysa exclaimed behind him. She, too, was being at-tacked. All the steps were demons—and Stile and Neysa were caught in the center. The trap had sprung at last. Hastily Stile tried to formulate a spell—but this was hard to do with the distraction of his feet getting chewed. Neysa changed into firefly form and hovered safely out of reach of the demons. “Send this spell straight to Hell!” he sang.
Nothing significant happened. Of course not; he had already used that spell. He needed a variant. “Send this smell—ouch!” The teeth were beginning to penetrate, as the demons grew steadily stronger. “Put this spell—in a shell!” he sang desperately.
The shell formed, pretty and white and corrugated like the clamshell he had in his haste visualized, enclosing all the demons—and Stile and Neysa too. He had not helped himself at all.
Neysa came to the rescue. She shifted to unicorn-form. There was barely room for her on the stairway, but her hooves were to a certain extent proof against the teeth of the demons. She sucked in her barrel-belly somewhat, giving herself scant clearance, and blew a note of invitation to Stile.
Gratefully he vaulted back onto her back. Neysa did a dance, her four hooves smashing at the teeth below. Now it was the demons who exclaimed in pain; they did not like this at all.
Neysa moved on up until she reached the top landing, bursting through the shell he had made. Bits of the shell flew down to mix with the bits of teeth littering the stair. Stile dismounted and stood looking back. “Something I don’t quite understand here,” he murmured as the demons at last achieved their full natural forms, but were unable to travel because of his spell. “If she has demons, why did she hide them there instead of sending them after me? Why did they come to life when they did, instead of when I first touched them? There’s a key here—“ Neysa changed back to girl-form, which really was more comfortable in these narrow confines. “Amulets must be invoked,” she reminded him. One thing about Neysa: she never chided him for the time he took to work things out his own way. Whatever he did, she helped. She was in many respects the ideal woman, though she was really a mare.
“Ah, yes.” Amulets were quiescent until animated by the minor magic of a verbal command. So these step-demon-amulets had waited for that magic. But he had not invoked them. He had merely fixed them in place. Unless it was not the words, but any magic directed at the amulet that accomplished the invoking. So when he cast his spell of stability—yes.
But this meant he would have to be careful how he used his magic here. No amulet could hurt him unless he invoked it—but he could accidentally invoke quite a few. Any that were within range when he made a spell. In fact—suddenly a great deal was coming clear!—this could explain the whole business of this carnival-castle. If it was defended by amulets that had to be invoked by the 2 intruders, these amulets would be useless unless something caused them to be activated. So—they were presented as prizes, that greedy people would naturally invoke. Because an amulet was just a bit of metal until it was invoked, worth little. When the golem-barkers claimed that “every-body wins” that was exactly what they meant. Or, more properly, everybody lost, since the amulets were attackers. Stile had acted as projected—and had he not been Adept himself, and on guard, he could have been in serious trouble from that first “prize.”
But these steps had not been prizes. They were a defense against magic—and that, too, had been pretty effective. So he was really making progress because he was passing from the random traps to the serious ones. The steps, that would not remain firm without a spell that converted them to demons...
Could it be that the Red Adept herself could not invoke her amulets—or that they would attack her if she did? Like bombs that destroyed whoever set them off? So that the intruder had to be forced to bring his doom upon himself? If so, and if he resolutely refrained from invoking amulets either by word or by the practice of magic, he should have the advantage over—
Advantage? Magic was his prime weapon! If he couldn’t use that, how could he prevail?
A very neat trap, to deprive him of his chief power! But unlike his alternate self. Stile had had a lifetime to develop his nonmagic skills. He could compete very well without magic. So if his refusal to invoke the hostile amulets limited him, it also limited his enemy, and he had the net advantage. This was a ploy by the Red Adept that was about to backfire.
“I think I have it straight,” Stile told Neysa. “Any magic invokes the amulets—but they can’t affect me if I don’t invoke them. So we’ll fight this out Proton-fashion. It may take some ingenuity to get past the hurdles, but it will be worth it.”
Neysa snorted dubiously, but made no overt objection. The passage narrowed as it wended its way into a hall of minors. Stile almost walked into the first one, as it was angled at forty-five degrees to make a right-angle turn look like straight-ahead. But Neysa, somehow more sensitive to this sort of thing than he, held him back momentarily, until he caught on. After that he was alert to the mirrors, and passed them safely.
Some were distorting reflectors, making him look huge-headed and huge-footed, like a goblin, and Neysa like a grotesque doll. Then the mirrors reversed, making both resemble blown-up balloons. Then—
Stile found himself falling. Intent on the mirror before him, he had not realized that one square of the floor was absent. A simple trick, that he had literally fallen for. He reacted in two ways, both bad: first, to grab for the sides, which were too slick to hold, and second to cry a spelclass="underline"